The Problem: It is difficult to turn an idea into reality.
The Solution: A ‘Do-Tank’ of people who are great at executing ideas.
There are many Think Tanks around the world, some of which come out with interesting and creative approaches to solving social and environmental problems, but many of whom have become much more staid over the past decade or so.
The world needs new creative ideas to solve age-old problems form homelessness to climate change, yet those with such ideas are often not the right people to bring it into reality.
Being a great creative often means you are not a good implementer and vice versa.
So, instead of more Think Tanks coming up with ideas that go nowhere for want of anyone capable of implementing them, it’s time to start creating Do Tanks – organisations with funding to hire the best people from commerce and industry and provide them with a budget to execute great ideas.
The Do Tank need not come up with any ideas itself (although it could have a combination of creatives to think up and identify from Open-Source research good ideas to take forward), rather it would be focused on implementing them, scaling them, and coming up with revenue models to fund them and make the projects a success in both the short- and long-term.
This website is a case in point – lots of ideas, but very little capacity to execute them, and particularly not to execute so many of them.
Do Tanks that were fully funded and spent money recruiting and retaining the best people from commerce and industry could have an extraordinary positive impact on society, implementing solutions to some of the biggest and most entrenched problems of our time, and empowering and inspiring creatives to come up with ideas to solve these problems, knowing they could get implemented.
A Do Tank would not be a standard charity – it needs to focus on hiring the best people to deliver maximum effect, and charities traditionally do not want to spend money on salaries (that’s a mistake, but that’s for a different post!).
The Do Tank concept could create a new career path for high performing people, where joining a Do Tank was a mark of career success, something highly aspirational, akin to becoming a CEO or similar.
An idea is almost worthless if it cannot be executed, but it can be worth Billions of dollars or more if it can be made into reality. It just makes sense, therefore, to create the capacity to execute ideas, since we know the returns will be phenomenal.
The time for the Do-Tank has come.
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